1

FROM A POLITICS OF NO
ALTERNATIVE TO A POLITICS OF FEAR
Illiberalism and Its Variants

Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

Introduction1
Liberal democracy is in crisis. This much seems undisputed in the literature and
media comments that have proliferated since 2016, when the Brexit referendum
and the election of Donald Trump ignited new debates about the meaning and
limitations of liberal democracy. If anything, this verdict has been consolidated
by subsequent electoral successes of populist parties in other European states,
such as France, Austria, Italy, and Germany, as well as similar tendencies in
Australia and Ontario, Canada’s most populous and globally connected prov-
ince. The dissatisfaction with the status quo was equally expressed in the initial
shift toward the left in Southern European countries such as Greece, Spain, and
Portugal—and the rise of right-wing parties that followed. Beyond the West,
the election of Jair Bolsonaro as the President of Brazil, turmoil in former
Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and an autocratic reinterpretation of democ-
racy under Abe, Erdogan, Modi, and Putin only reinforce the sense that the
triumphant era of liberalism is over.
The engines of neoliberal, market-led globalization, which appeared un-
paralleled in power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seem to have come to a
screeching halt. So, too, has the confidence or at least the hope that democ-
racy, in tandem with markets, was on an inevitable course to expand happily
ever after. In the West, what is common across otherwise wildly different
cases is a distrust for existing parties, deep inequalities coupled with extreme
polarization of the political spectrum, and the desire for anti-establishment
politicians to clean up corruption and restore responsiveness to their constit-
uencies. On both sides of the Atlantic, opponents of free trade and critics of
globalization are organizing; so are ethnic nationalists, who see an opening
4  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

for more authoritarian politics. More often than not, elections turn into tri-
bunals on the establishment, with the judgment turning against the elites and
the status quo.
On a global level, liberalism and theories of democratic peace seem to have
lost explanatory power and normative appeal. Hopes for global convergence
and integration are thwarted as the divide between the global north and the
global south deepens further. Humanitarian interventions are being refuted as
thinly veiled geostrategic maneuvers and the West seems to have lost its lure—a
process accelerating as its core countries seem to be themselves turning away
from the liberal creed. National interests are again dominating international
relations (IR), while more normative approaches seeking cooperation and inte-
gration tend to be rejected as naïve do-goodism. Supranational institutions of
the post-World War II era—the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and
the World Trade Organization—are eroding under the pressures of protection-
ism and neo-mercantilist trade conflicts. In short, Realpolitik is back. And so are
great power politics, weapons races, and zero-sum politics.
Illiberal forces quickly seek to fill the ideological vacuum left by a hollowed
out liberal idealism. Once in office, however, demagogues not only fail to de-
liver most of their promises, but also and perhaps more importantly, alter the
structures of the state and civil society in ways that are likely to inflict long-
term damage. Undoing checks and balances, in particular through interven-
tion in the judiciary, public officials’ conflicts of interest, and the defamation
of the media, they put essential pillars of democracy and core ideals of the
enlightenment under attack. In the absence of meaningful reform, strongman
leaders distract attention from their bankrupt political vision with xenophobic
appeals and a politics of indignation, further unraveling prior commitments to
liberal democracy. Meanwhile, they revise institutional and procedural pillars
of democracy, indicating that illiberal politics—a fear-driven, authoritarian
reorganization of the state around exclusive and patriarchal notions of an ethnic
demos that seeks to undo the norms and institutions of political liberalism—
will not be effaced easily with the next election, impeachment, or vote of no
confidence.
We contend that the variegated forms of illiberalism—much like variegated
neoliberalization patterns (Brenner et al. 2010)—materialize in otherwise very
different contexts at the same historical moment because they have a set of
common denominators. Illiberal tendencies seek to partially reshape neoliberal
practices and ideas of the past half-century—the politics of no alternative that pos-
ited the inevitability of globalization and the superiority of market solutions—
at a moment where these practices and ideas no longer seem legitimate in the
core countries of the North Atlantic. While progressives have been criticizing
neoliberalism for a long time, it is the right-wing critique of neoliberalism
that is much more successfully redoing neoliberalism, and, potentially, undoing
liberal democracy in the West and beyond.
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  5

Unlike the left, which argues for reform through redistribution and decom-
modification to address the consequences of welfare state retrenchment and
deep inequalities, right-wing critiques operate from the understanding that
the demos—defined in exclusive, ethno-nationalist terms—is under attack by
overwhelming outside forces, while the state, corrupted by naïve or deluded
elites—the much-scolded establishment—is unwilling or unable to protect its
citizens. Calls for law and order, stricter security, and a reassertion of popular
sovereignty are at the heart of this politics of fear.2 From that perspective, reform
won’t do and the institutional safeguards of democracy, above all the separation
of powers and the protection of minority rights, become viewed as hindrances
to the defense of the “true” demos. Liberal democracy seems to stand in the
way of “true” democracy.
How does this challenge to liberal democracy compare across contexts? How
does the perceived failure of liberal policies and institutions in one region impact
the global standing of liberal democracy in others? How far has the politics of fear
progressed? And has a liberal vision of democracy been unseated? The chapters
that follow explore the current crisis of liberal democracies conceptually and em-
pirically, putting into perspective a wide range of country examples in the West-
ern and Non-Western context, to seek answers to these questions and develop
a vocabulary to better fathom illiberal tendencies. As they show, democracies
around the world are facing a two-pronged crisis. One part of the crisis brought
figures such as Trump, Johnson, and Orban into office in the first place. This is
very much a crisis emerging from within the neoliberal paradigm. The second
part of the crisis is currently unfolding as such political figures capture state power.

Comparing Global Variants of Illiberalism

Integral to the new illiberal international, understood as an internal outgrowth
and not simply as an emulation of anti-Western autocrats such as Vladimir Putin,
are the antipluralist, often demagogic, politicians who come to wield almost un-
checked state power in both longstanding and emerging democracies (see also
Galston 2018). Responding to recent electoral successes by non-establishment
parties in very different contexts—from Brazil to the US, the UK to Israel—
recent literature in the burgeoning field on “populism” is often written for a broad
audience and, given the focus on one or another national readership, can lack the
comparative scope and empirical depth for which this volume aims. To be sure,
political context matters both for outcomes and potential ways of addressing crisis
tendencies. Political cultures, institutional path dependencies, the role of a state in
the international order as a hegemonic or peripheral power, are crucial for how
the crisis dynamics play out in different settings. But because it tends to ignore
important parallels that transcend, for instance, the specificities of a given party
system—e.g. polarization in the US two-party system—or national context—e.g.
Germany’s divided past—existing work undertheorizes commonalities.3
6  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

There is, of course, a risk of treating all these cases—Brazil and the US,
Germany, and India—the same. They are not. And we are not aiming to do
that. The danger of such an endeavor would be to misunderstand common
developments as though they naturally evolved in tandem developing such
internal propulsion as to become almost inevitable—a wave of autocratiza-
tion. What is the added value of bringing all these developments into one
perspective, then? Above all, it enables us to explore the global scope of related
phenomena and to stress parallels and potential pathways. This, in turn, helps
us to theorize certain patterns that we otherwise would not see because they
might appear conjunctural or coincidental in an individual context where they
are not. Trump, for instance, is not simply chaotic even though he is often por-
trayed as such. Viewing him in comparison helps to outline what is actually a
rather coherent pattern of policy visions.
While too much of the work on populism focuses only on state-by-state
unit-level idiosyncrasies, we also hope to identify a broader context in which
all this happens, common preconditions that facilitate the rise of autocrats, and
certain strategies that they use to mobilize their voter base, seize state capac-
ities, and act while in office. Although the empirical cases examined in this
volume reflect a wide range of political systems, different democratic traditions,
and economic contexts, the paths toward autocracy are contiguous. As such, we
can sketch out something like an ideal-typical trajectory of de-democratization
that we can witness in otherwise very different places—even if the starting
point and (therefore) the end results differ in important ways.

The Problem with the Term Populism

Before we sketch these broader global patterns, an important terminological
caveat is in order. Notwithstanding Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) recent explicit call
for a “left populism,” it is difficult to find voices that self-identify as populist
within the circle of those hoping to sustain liberal democracy through its cur-
rent moment of crisis. The term is usually used in a pejorative manner to dis-
credit different movements. This creates a series of problems. Populist critiques
might well voice true grievances that should be taken seriously and surely not
be rejected out of hand. Worse, knee-jerk reactions against populist movements
ignore the democratic potentials of binding recently politicized populations
back into actual politics (Eichengreen 2018; see Calhoun in this volume).
As such, the common deployment of the term “populism,” both within so-
cial science and by political actors associated with liberalisms of the left, right,
and center, only aggravates the well-known crisis of legitimacy. As Jan-Werner
Müller crucially points out, “[n]ot everyone who criticizes elites is a populist”
(Müller 2016, 101). But oftentimes, in practice, this distinction is blurred so
that many public discussions do fall into a by-now familiar dichotomy: either
you are with the status quo or a populist. The simple derogatory use of the
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  7

term populist equates all such movements regardless of political ideology and
direction, playing down actual fascist groups and aggrandizing fringe move-
ments, placing anyone skeptical of liberalism into a single category: enemies of
democracy. This is hampering an already fraught political discourse. We use
different terms to refer to critics of liberalism, (civic or ethnic) nationalists, and
fascists, and there are reasons for that.
From an analytical perspective, another crucial problem with the term pop-
ulism is that, if used uncritically, it ignores the more structural and discursive
factors that have given rise to widespread discontent in the first place. This, of
course, has far-reaching implications. If one interprets the rise of illiberalism
simply as the outbreak of a contagious craze at the populist fringes, the status
quo ante, that is, a return to neoliberalism, might suddenly appear quite ap-
pealing. But “global Trumpism” (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume) has its
roots precisely in neoliberalization processes. It is not simply the result of an
irrational aberrance. This is why simply returning to the politics that paved the
way for illiberalism would do little to resolve the more fundamental problems
at stake that emanate from an internal crisis of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism’s Implosion
Deep are the roots of those thinkers who advocate for free market capitalism. But
Adam Smith (particularly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments), John Stuart Mill, and
Alexis de Tocqueville would all have agreed that homo economicus—as someone
who only strives for the maximization of their self-interest in a competitive
struggle for survival of all against all—is not enough; for liberalism to thrive, the
ideal subject would also have to be someone who can take informed choices and
sometimes prioritize the common good: homo politicus! For this political tradition
within liberalism, freedom of opinion, minority rights, and plurality mattered.
Social progress, its enthusiasts thought, depended on the openness of societies. Yes,
markets were important, but they were not sufficient, by themselves, for democ-
racy to succeed. There needed to be associations, free media, and a sensus communis
(not just “common sense” but also a sense of community) for democracy to be
actually possible (see Atanassow and Scruton in this volume).
Liberalism consists of a set of practices and ideas that since the beginning of
the enlightenment era have foregrounded the importance of individual liberty,
private property, and the market in organizing societies. Importantly, however,
liberalism is a deeply ambivalent term. Two hearts beat in its chest. Whereas
economic liberalism emerged as a critique of the absolutist state and an attempt to
strengthen the emerging bourgeois classes in 18th-century Europe, what we
(along with others; e.g. Brown 2015) call political liberalism of the 19th century
foregrounds the need for a minimal, but nonetheless interventionist, state and
a strong civil society to hem in the outgrowths of the market and allow certain
civic and political rights for the citizenry.
8  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

In short, economic liberalism is mostly concerned with market freedoms and

assumes that there is an automatic expansion of political rights once markets
grow. By contrast, it is political liberalism that develops a more profound under-
standing of democracy and that asks for certain institutional arrangements (such
as elections, the separation of powers, political parties), for individual rights and
certain substantive public goods (political freedoms, education, information,
etc.) to ensure its existence. In the first half of the 20th century, it was ulti-
mately this political tradition that fostered the rise of modern welfare states, in
and beyond the West, to add certain social rights to protect citizens from social
risks (such as unemployment, sickness, old age, etc.) and make possible deeper
and wider participation in democratic institutions.
Since the late 1970s, however, neoliberalization processes—economic lib-
eralism in practice, not theory—have reversed these achievements of political
liberalism, under the pretense that if markets rule, the rest will follow (Brenner
et  al. 2010; Peck 2010). As we contend, it is this long-term crisis of political
liberalism—hollowed out by a notion that economic liberalism would equally
sustain and extend democracy—that has prepared the ground for illiberal tenden-
cies. Thus, Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill would probably agree with our view.
At the risk of belaboring the point, it is important to emphasize that this is
not an external crisis that has suddenly overcome all liberal democracies. Put
differently, this is not simply a wave of autocratization analogous to Samuel
Huntington’s notion of waves of democratization (Huntington 1991). At the
heart of this immanent crisis is a confusion. Or rather: a slippage. In Western
democracies, economic liberalism has hijacked the political project of the en-
lightenment. It has inverted emancipatory social projects into social division,
political apathy, and full-out anger. In economic and social policy, an impov-
erished understanding of liberal democracy, equaling democratization with
the expansion of markets and the protection of individual property rights, has
eclipsed the principles of political liberalism. As such, market fundamentalism
has left us bereft of a language to think and act politically outside the terms set
by economic thinking (Brown 2015).
Karl Polanyi, a central thinker to describe this predicament of market so-
ciety, has been proven right in many things, but wrong on one key point:
laissez-faire was by no means as dead as he thought, even if it might have seemed
so in 1944, when he published his seminal book The Great Transformation. To be
certain, he did write at a moment where it could easily have seemed that way:
this moment saw the birth of a Bretton Woods order, through which social
policies gradually expanded to ever larger sections of societies in the North
Atlantic. In many contexts, the welfare state thus did take off the edges of eco-
nomic liberalism (while the West became a role model for others to imitate).
However, the 1970s resuscitated old beliefs. A bundle of crises—the OPEC oil
crisis, stagflation, and fiscal crises at the local government level (as, most prom-
inently, in New York City)—delivered a death blow to the Keynesian-Fordist
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  9

compromise and the post-World War II order. The conservative revolution of

the early 1980s was successful in developing a narrative that held government
interventionism responsible for the crisis, and government leaders (with Ron-
ald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher being just the most often-cited) proceeded
to dismantle regulations and privatize public goods in the name of efficiency
and under the banner of individual freedom. In most Western democracies,
these processes included a period of rolling back Keynesian institutions in the
1980s, and rolling out and deepening neoliberal policy agendas through wel-
fare state retrenchment, labor market deregulation, and free trade agreements
in the 1990s and 2000s (see Brenner et al. 2010).
Again, markets took precedence over politics. In the process, Hayek’s “road
to serfdom” led instead to a radicalization of the concept of the market. Not
only, now, were social progress and the growth of markets supposed to go
together, as they did in the works of the classical economists. No, the argu-
ment went: without freely competitive markets, democracy would be utterly
impossible. The more that social order was left to the market mechanism, the
greater the degree of democracy, while the more active the state, the greater
the degree of oppression. While market failure might well occur, the risks of
government failure would always be worse still. This fanatical orientation of
economic liberalism’s market philosophy in the West was amplified after the
fall of the Soviet Union, given that the failure of actually existing socialism
seemed to spell out the lack of any viable alternative to liberal capitalism. The
global expansion of neoliberalism under these preconditions also explains the
impact of the crisis today as markets have expanded in every social sphere in
and between nation-states.
The blind faith in market rule ignored the risks at stake. The promise of
personal fulfillment that it incited in individuals worked so long as there was
upward mobility because the belief in one’s own opportunities for success could
compensate for some of the retrenchment of the welfare state. In the wake of
the financial crisis of 2008, however, this belief in individual success no longer
seemed appropriate (Hopkin 2020). In the global north, the path of fulfill-
ment through consumption could no longer be maintained with the help of
cheap credit and affordable goods from abroad. Meanwhile, given the empha-
sis on individual responsibility in the unbundling of social systems since the
Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the middle class had lost many of its rights to
participate in decision-making both in the workplace and, increasingly, in pol-
itics. Just as public goods had been disappearing, individuals found themselves
increasingly left alone (Honig 2017; Vormann and Lammert 2019), while the
fragmentation of the public sphere made it more and more difficult, if not im-
possible, to articulate and pursue emancipatory political projects (see Milstein
in this volume). The promise of prosperity, freedom, and peace, however, as
supposedly enabled by market globalization proved to be only unevenly ful-
filled, at best. Inequalities had grown by leaps and bounds within and between
10  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

countries, and health care and social security systems are today massively un-
derfinanced (see Lammert in this volume).
Not only did the blessings of the market, unanimously heralded after the
Cold War, fail to materialize; the market also did harm. Instead of the salutary
promise of “trickle-down” and the blooming fields of economic integration,
there followed stagnating salaries, exploding living costs, and an ever-widening
gap between rich and poor (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume). In addition,
the privatization of public goods made the logic of the highest bidder spread
to many areas of life pushing the fragmentation of society to new extremes. As
wealth became concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of
individuals, the economization of society and politics began to threaten social
cohesion. In numerous countries, the fissure today runs along the divide be-
tween urban and rural areas, highly qualified specialists and individuals with
less education, self-designated elites and those who have been economically
left behind.
As globalization seemed inexorable (and ultimately beneficial to all), in-
creasingly technocratic politics did little to halt the hollowing out of market
protections (see Berkowitz in this volume). In the West, the so-called Third
Way of the immediate post-Cold War era instead promised many things to
many people: the center-right was appeased through cuts in social spending
in the name of competitiveness, while the center-left emphasized the cosmo-
politan potentials of globalization. Interestingly, the “bloated state” that had
been held responsible for the crises of the 1970s ultimately did not become any
smaller. Its priorities simply shifted: from redistribution to militarization, from
investments in public goods through federal and local governments to the so-
called public-private partnerships that mimicked private competition by shift-
ing costs and blame to the public actors—ultimately making these solutions
across policy fields neither less expensive nor less exclusive or more democratic,
for that matter. As flexible, precarious working conditions grew in number,
however, as systems to buffer social risk were left unfunded, and politicians
no longer seemed to listen to the citizenry (and sometimes were found to be
corrupted), the dissatisfaction with the status quo grew and these politics of no
alternative divided society along existing default lines.
Liberal democracy increasingly appeared as an empty shell. Even in those
presumably stable democracies of the West, whole segments of the popula-
tion no longer felt heard by politicians. Influence on the political process—a
core element of functioning representative democracies—appeared as a privi-
lege reserved for the lobbyists and water-carriers of business and the super-rich
(Gilens 2012). A deep rift therefore opened up between privileged populations
and those who feared losing their social status, an unsavory combination that,
as Jill Frank (2005, 74–75) notes, Aristotle already identified in Politics (Book
3, Chapters 1–4) as anathema for rule by constitution, i.e. for a politeia, the
“healthy regime type” where many share in rule that is aligned with and can
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  11

degenerate into demokratia, the “popular” regime. As Robert A. Dahl (1989,

18) foregrounds with view to the Athenian city-state, “no state could hope to
be a good polis if its citizens were greatly unequal.” If citizens no longer act for
the common good, if there is a disconnect between those who govern and the
governed, questions of legitimacy arise quickly. The same still holds true for
modern, large-scale democracy.

Cascading Effects: The Global Crisis of Liberalism

The crisis of liberal democracy is truly global mainly because the politics of
no alternatives pursued by economic liberals in the name of market global-
ization had its origins in a similar premise in Europe and the US (Vormann
and Lammert 2019), and by implication through extended networks of market
exchange and finance, as well as Bretton Woods institutions and other enti-
ties of global governance, it extended beyond these countries of the core. A
neo-classical vision of market rule has therefore dominated the politics of the
last decades, not only in the settled democracies of the NATO alliance and
in the EU but also in the so-called emerging democracies of Latin America
and Asia. Within nation-states, it has meant shrinking governments through
budget cuts and fiscal conservatism; privatizing public goods; and deregulating
labor, financial, and health-care markets, while simultaneously transferring to
individuals the responsibility for their social reproduction and employment.
In international affairs, it has meant forcibly expanding free trade through the
policies of the Washington Consensus, which was then—in a wish that quickly
soured—also expected to ensure a democratic peace among rational state ac-
tors, thanks to the interdependence and mutual agreements between states that
were supposed to accompany such policies.
While around the most recent turn of the century even autocratic leaders felt
the need to aspire at least in rhetoric to the ideal of democratic governance—
think of Putin’s “sovereign democracy” or, for that matter, Orban’s “illiberal
democracy”—the enthusiasm of an American-led expansion of liberal democ-
racy has lost all its momentum. The implosion of neoliberalism as an ideal and
a set of practices are central to this. Not only were many cosmopolitan hopes
thwarted, liberal democracy has increasingly been seen as a fig leaf for wel-
fare state retrenchment in the West, and structural adjustment in the semi-
periphery and the global south. Economic liberalism has failed, but political
liberalism is being held responsible. The blame for underfunded social goods
was shifted to the open society in an odd but by no means accidental reversal
and distortion of causalities.
At the same time that the Washington Consensus hollowed out the hopes for
integration and political emancipation, US hegemony entered a crisis which,
since the turn of the century, has often been described, particularly with the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the expansion of NATO (and EU) into
12  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

Eastern Europe, as the fallout from an imperial overstretch. In that context,

the self-ascribed moral leadership of the US was fundamentally weakened by
the use of torture under George W. Bush, the failure to close Guantanamo
under Barack Obama, not to speak of Donald Trump’s pivot from the idealist
tradition to neo-realist zero-sum logics and full-on confrontation. Trump’s
decision to give up the ideal of American moral leadership altogether hence al-
most seems consequent. It is certainly consequential for the viability of a liberal
vision of inter-state relations.
Unsurprisingly, this reorientation away from the post-Cold War liberal con-
sensus is currently a hot topic in scholarly debates in the political science sub-
field of IR. The “realist” perspective welcomes it, pointing out how the liberal
project had always been a set of high-flying ideals that were bound to fail from
the outset and should be given up altogether. Stephen Walt’s book with the
telling title The Hell of Good Intentions paradigmatically argues that

America’s pursuit of liberal hegemony poisoned relations with Russia, led

to costly quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries […]
and encouraged both states and non-state actors to resist U.S. efforts or to
exploit them for their own benefit.
(Walt 2018, 14)

Like Walt, John J. Mearsheimer highlights the impossibility of the “liberal

dream” (Mearsheimer 2018) which had dragged the US into unnecessary
and dangerous engagements abroad, and urges policy-makers to balance off-
shore rivals through tactics of divide and conquer while redirecting military
investments into the rebuilding of public goods at home—interestingly, a
traditional claim of the left (for instance, Williams 1959). Even liberal the-
orists, while they don’t share the prescriptive conclusions, agree that the
liberal order is in peril (Ikenberry 2018; Rose 2019). The years of confidence
and notions of an inevitable liberal expansion under the moral leadership of
the US seem long gone. Against this backdrop of a compromised ideological
consensus and the loss of a common compass, in the global south and in the
semi-periphery, the hopes of the post-Cold War have abated (Krastev in this
volume). The 1990s enthusiasm for marketization, very much at the center
of cosmopolitan hopes of global emancipation and integration, now rings
hollow.
Less discussed in the IR literature, but nonetheless crucial is the fact that,
much in line with Karl Polanyi’s observation, illiberalism springs spontaneously
from a legitimate set of concerns and grievances within a multitude of different
societies. It is not, at its origins, an “anti-liberal conspiracy” (Polanyi [1944]
2001, 151) concocted and premeditated by a new type of political conscious-
ness. The nearly simultaneous parallels in re-nationalization not only in the US
and the UK but clear across the world and encompassing established and new
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  13

democracies from Brazil to India indicate something deeper. Namely, that and
how the hopes of political emancipation, which still prevailed in the late 20th
century, have disappeared precisely alongside the expansion and integration of
the market within all spheres of politics.

Progressive Critiques: Liberalism Is Not Rule by Markets

It is not that the left didn’t see it coming. A body of work emerged much before
the first so-called populists came to power that voiced a very strong critique of
the neoliberal politics of no alternative. Political scientists and economic sociol-
ogists, among others, explained the central themes at stake in today’s debates
about the crisis of democracy in great breadth and depth (Mouffe 2005; Crouch
2011; Wallerstein et al. 2013; Vogl 2015; Streeck 2017). As such, the down-
sides of globalization and the dangers that result from inequalities and threaten
social stability have been identified, analyzed, and denounced in recent de-
cades by many authors in Europe, North America, and beyond (Stiglitz 2003;
Wilkinson 2005; Bartels 2008). Nor was it only academics and readers with
specialized interests who began to think more deeply about inequalities and
their dangers. The topic veritably exploded following the global financial crisis,
and authors like Blyth (2013) and Piketty (2014) became very well-known far
beyond the ivory tower.
The critique of neoliberalism included, as one of its elements, a critique of
the market that essentially took aim at the negative consequences of the econo-
mization of societies—a tendency that, according to these authors, endangered
democracy. Not everything, they argued, can be simply treated as a commodity
(in other words, not all things can be commodified). Markets have technical,
moral, and political limits.4 Subsumed within the market, societies lose their
ability to think and act politically. In that way, technocracy, as it has come
to dominate education, the legal system, and political discourse, renders true
politics impossible (Crouch 2015). Adding to this, market society’s growing in-
equalities translate into unequal influence on politics. As such, responsiveness,
the extent to which political representatives still attend to the interests of the
people, is extremely unequally distributed.5
In sum, this progressive critique highlighted, democracy is sometimes at
odds with (economic) liberalism, because even though the latter might aim
to protect certain individual rights and thereby the constituents of the demos
from the tyranny of the majority, its emphasis on individual liberty can contra-
dict the need for public virtue. Put differently, liberalism—even more so in its
economic version—gives only a partial vision of democracy that foregrounds
individualism at the detriment of other potential understandings and practices
of democracy (see Plattner in this volume). However, as innumerable authors
have insisted since at least the 18th century—Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill
again come to mind—democracy is more than market rule.
14  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

This progressive critique did not end with calling into question the current
state of affairs. Many critics on the left even pointed to possible ways out of the
crisis. Particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis, some authors stressed
the role of the state as an important actor, despite globalization, and that, as in the
past, government should be called to account on matters that concern the public.
Since the government is responsible for constructing infrastructure and investing
in science and education, for instance, and since it exerts an often-invisible influ-
ence on the distribution of resources, it bears a significant share of responsibility
for social welfare (Peck 2010; Mettler 2011; Mazzucato 2015). Especially where
there is upward redistribution, the government must act in accordance with the
common good, not wealthy special interests—or so went the normative argu-
ment. In other words, the state needs to be foregrounded and held accountable.
This could indeed be a starting point for rebuilding the (center) left from its
ashes, because recognizing such responsibility means that the state does have
room for maneuver and therefore could engage in a politics of redistribution
and decommodification—politics, in other words, are not without alternative.
But, be that as it may, in practice, after every crisis, exactly the opposite seems
to transpire: the costs and indebtedness of private interests have been foisted
upon the public many times over, while the state has been regarded either as
helpless, wasteful, or inefficient. The global financial crisis is the best example.
In many countries, it was renamed a sovereign debt crisis (which it never was)
to shift both burden and blame from the private to the public. Mark Blyth, on
this subject, talks about the “greatest bait-and-switch operation in modern his-
tory” (Blyth 2013, 73). All this was happening before the backdrop of historical
economic inequalities and, in many countries, long-term real wage stagnation
for the majority of workers (Runciman 2018). Is it surprising that there would
be anger against economic and political elites?
Under these conditions of frustration and disillusionment, of deep inequalities
and precarious labor, little events can spark turmoil. Think of the fuel hikes in
France that unleashed the yellow-vest movement and of the increase in public
transportation prices in Santiago that triggered some of the largest protests of
Chilean history. Add to this a series of external shocks, such as natural disasters
(as in Turkey), terrorist attacks (as in France), foreign interference (as in the US),
and an already frail system seems much more vulnerable than the immediate
post-Cold War era would have made seem possible. The 20th century’s hopes
of equality and freedom, and of global peace and progress have been called off.
However, responses to the global crisis of neoliberalism are not preordained.
What progressive voices offered as an alternative was to reject the dangers of
market-led economic liberalism and embrace more political visions of society.
They reasserted political liberalism to point out the divisiveness of market rule
and the responsibility of the state. However, the left, despite movements such as
Occupy Wall Street or Blockupy, was much less successful in articulating that
political vision and translating it into electoral victories than the right.
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  15

The Critique from the Right: Who Belongs?

For the right, the solution to the long-term crisis of neoliberalism was not a
salvaging of political liberalism, but its rejection in favor of a narrowly defined
reassertion of popular sovereignty. As such, economic liberalism’s (very) myo-
pic vision of market-led democracy has been in the process of being replaced
by another, equally partial understanding of the idea of democracy. For all the
differences between regimes and actors (self-)identified as illiberal, today they
each share a key conviction: popular sovereignty, not the rule of law or protec-
tion of minorities, is the sine qua non of democracy.
Despite their differences, contributors to this volume—who explore the cri-
sis phenomena at hand from conservative and progressive points of view—share
the sense that illiberalism is a symptom rather than a root cause of the crisis of
liberal democracy. Both left and right critique an overexposure to globaliza-
tion and break with the dominant post-Cold War discourse of liberalism. In
practice, as we shall argue, illiberalism is mainly a phenomenon of the right
and it has given rise to a strange hybrid—in essence, an authoritarian turn and
reinvention of neoliberalism (see Peck and Theodore 2019), that holds on to
some selected neoliberal traditions and democratic rituals, but rejects liberal
democracy as a normative social goal and a guiding principle to govern global
economic exchange and political relations.
Such right-wing illiberalism misconstrues the body politic as Volkskörper,
that is as “an organicist and essentialist entity” in which ‘the people’ comes to
be regarded as “a somehow unified organism” (Paul 2019, 128). Globalization in
its different forms—financialization, trade, migration—by contrast, is regarded
as a threat to that demos which needs to be diverted. Even from a very general
point of view, the concept of democracy is always ambivalent because the root
of the term—‘rule by the many’ or ‘people’s rule’—neither tells us which peo-
ple (demos in Greek, whence “democracy” derives) it applies to nor by which
means such people should rule and be ruled. As such, modern democracies are
constantly disputed: who is in and who is not matter. Moreover, the methods
of rule are contested. Under which conditions is a representative government
legitimate? How and for whom to ensure democracy? (Dahl 1989) Illiberalism
is concerned, quite precisely, with the rejection of the political and social claims
of political liberalism as they extend to a widely defined demos. Such rights and
privileges should only be extended to the “true” citizen (determined by rather
arbitrary ethnic approximations defined by the illiberal politician).
This commitment to popular sovereignty around a narrowly defined demos,
in short, constitutes the core characterization of illiberalism, traversing the con-
ceptual and terminological fields discussed in different ways and with different
assumptions in this book. Interestingly, at the same time, illiberalism, while it
rejects tenets of inclusive political liberalism, does not necessarily refute all the
precepts of economic liberalism. Domestically, illiberal politicians indeed tend
16  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

to even strengthen market rule, while bracketing all democratic protection of

individual and minority rights. It remains an open question, then, whether the
commitment to popular and/or national sovereignty asserted by those who take
up the mantle of “illiberal democracy” only pays lip service to those frustrated
with the effects of globalization or whether it ought to be considered worthy
of the name “democracy” at all. Even more so since in actual illiberal politics,
more often than not, the closing of borders and erecting of (trade) barriers are
matched by domestic hyper-deregulation and privatization. This will do little,
of course, to address the problems of inequality and irresponsiveness at home—
that we claim to be causal for the crisis of liberal democracy.
As discussed in detail in Marc Plattner’s contribution to this volume, Fareed
Zakaria’s term illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997), rendered famous in a 2014
speech by Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, is a misnomer in that
sense. Rather, undemocratic (purely economic) liberalism would more aptly describe
what we see in many contexts where a further rollout of privatization and liber-
alization of the economy—economic liberalism in its truncated and amplified
form—dovetails with a retrenchment of civil liberties, voting rights, and other
political freedoms and social rights.

Not Just Reaction: Illiberalism’s Productive Capacities

So far, we have argued that, at this specific historical juncture, illiberalism rises as a
promise to return to a vague pre-neoliberal era. Right-wing anti-globalization forces
are seeking to protect nationals from the outside in a hostile world. But unlike the
Keynesian-Fordist welfare state, there is hardly an articulation of an emancipatory
political counter-vision—and if there is, it targets only an imagined ethnic core and
seeks to restore traditional patriarchal values. Instead, we witness an extreme form of
clientelism and the radical slashing of education budgets, a repealing of environmen-
tal protections—think of the environmental protection agency in the US, the burn-
ing down of rainforests in Brazil, or even the weak climate pact in Germany—and a
massive deregulation of the financial sector. This is no longer quite neoliberalism tout
court, given, for instance, the turn away from free trade or from the lip service to de-
mocracy and cosmopolitanism; nor quite fascism, because some democratic institu-
tions persist, even if in an often very truncated way. This in-between phenomenon,
described by some as a period of transition, or “interregnum” (Berman 2019), is what
we see as the inflection point from which illiberalism emerges.
The illiberal alternative gestures toward a set of ways out of the neoliberal
politics of no alternative. In its most extreme variants, essentially, what arises
from the ruins of neoliberalism (Brown 2019), from the vacant ideological
room left by undemocratic liberalism (Mounk 2018), in the absence of a strong
center-left (or center-right) alternative, is a politics of fear. This politics of
fear operates on prerational terms. It seeks to drive a wedge between the ‘true
demos’ and the outsider. It works from the premise that the state is no longer
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  17

performing its basic tasks. That it no longer holds the monopoly of violence and
can no longer protect citizens from foreign invasion and inner disintegration,
and that the citizen has to take self-defense in their own hands.
No longer, obviously, is this the left critique of inequality and the injus-
tices of globalization that could be faced by addressing the shortcomings of
the state in terms of redistribution or decommodification. It is a critique that
shifts the blame from the economic inequalities between the haves and the
have-nots, between the nation as a group of citizens and workers below—the
99%—against the 1% at the top (see OWS) to a critique of inside and outside:
the ethnic nation that defends its traditional values and is under threat by over-
whelming external forces that the state seems unwilling (because of its multi-
cultural politics and openness to trade) or unable (see the critique of reduced
state capacities that is shared with the mainstream discourse) to mitigate.
Under these circumstances of perceived emergency and threat to the very core
of the populace, the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy no longer
seem to hold. Everyone who opposes the ‘will of the people’ is an enemy: the me-
dia that spread fakenews to distract us from what is really going on, the foreigner
who is taking away resources, the parliament that is dysfunctional and has been
doing nothing but talking (“all talk, no action”). And so the essential pillars of the
rational enlightenment, necessary to make democracy possible, are toppled. The
checks and balances are unfit to tackle the challenges and are set aside. Govern-
ment operates by decree and by state of emergency. The politics of fear, such as
those we see in the wake of the still-unfolding global pandemic, make pluralistic
debate impossible. They pose political problems as life or death questions. Once
this threshold is passed, there is simply no place for reason and reasoned argument.
As such, illiberalism is not only a reaction to the inner tensions and contradic-
tions of neoliberalism. It has productive capacities. To attain power, would-be au-
tocrats reinforce the climate of anxiety—by creating fears of an ethnic exchange
(a conspiracy theory of the extreme right), instrumentalizing dissatisfaction with
migration inflows (such as European political mobilizations against refugees since
2015 and candidate Trump’s call to “Build That Wall!”), and creating an impres-
sion of constant threats to physical safety from terrorists and other criminals (as in
Duterte’s war on drug dealers). By demonizing others, demagogues can demand a
partial reversal of globalization processes, insisting on popular sovereignty, while
at the same time reinventing the demos as an ethnic, rather than civic group,
united by birth and territory rather than common values and interests.
What is at stake, then, is not just a conservative attempt to address the true
grievances (that the political left would accept do exist) by shifting the focus
from economic inequalities to outside threats and the blame to political rivals.
Rather, it is to impose a different form of society. Illiberal actors seek to replace
the multicultural and emancipated vision that was used under neoliberalism to
paint economization in humanistic and cosmopolitan colors, by a more nation-
alistic vision of a new (but really very old) social project.
18  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

This restoration of a deeply conservative, imaginary primordial state of

affairs (that, of course, never really existed) seeks to also enforce pre-modern
patriarchal gender relations. As such, it rejects claims by the LGBTQ com-
munity, perceived as postmodern aberrations and extravagances. Feminism
and gender studies departments become key targets of attack precisely because
they undermine the legitimacy of such unquestioned traditions of patriarchy
that autocrats seek to restore. This does not mean that critique of gender
studies shouldn’t be allowed or that all arguments in feminist work (as if this
were one coherent set of arguments in the first place!) should be blindly ac-
cepted. Nor does it mean that concerns about ideological uniformity in aca-
demic contexts are inherently illiberal or empirically false.6 Nevertheless, it
is striking that across contexts where illiberal tendencies gain political force,
such work is under direct attack and often has to suffer deep budget cuts.
Beyond the academe, and immediately relevant to the life worlds of millions
of women, illiberal actors push for antiquated, patriarchal gender roles, un-
dermining women’s reproductive rights (as, for instance, in Poland where the
Law and Justice party, PiS, seeks to render abortions illegal). In that sense, the
productive capacities of illiberalism have a lot to do with the reassertion of
paternalistic notions of white masculinity.

Revising the Demos

Unsurprisingly, as illiberal and authoritarian trends are on the rise—both in
fragile and seemingly robust democracies—there is growing concern about the
longevity of both liberalism and democracy. One source of the growing popu-
larity of illiberal policies, then, is an expression of a crisis of conviction owing
to economic, cultural, and institutional distortions of citizens’ self-interest as
they understand it. Alongside this, there is a second source that cannot merely
be written off as “populist.” Namely, anti-system movements and political par-
ties have been able to exploit the discrepancy between supranational institu-
tions (the EU, the WTO, the UN) and respective national interests, conceived
narrowly as those of an ethnic community in need of protection from outside
forces. Different actors have used such outside threats to mobilize opponents of
globalization and to raise claims for (often rural, majority ethnic) core constitu-
encies. From this vantage point, (supranational) democracy has been viewed as
a floodgate for foreign interests willing to exploit an already vulnerable national
population whose national public goods (infrastructures, health-care systems,
pension and retirement systems) have been destroyed by forces of globalization.
These distortions of the constitutional protection of minorities in the service
of authoritarian (or authoritarian-like) policies expose real tensions within the
practice of constitutionalism and self-understanding of constitutionally elected
representatives of “the whole people” who also explicitly identify with ethni-
cally or ideologically defined partisans within that people.
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  19

In Western democracies, it is telling that upon closer examination, it is

not actually those who have suffered most from globalization who are in
uproar: for instance, the minorities exploited in highly precarious jobs along
the supply chain, from resource extraction to consumption. Rather, it is
a specific type of citizen (often white males in former manufacturing re-
gions) who had previously benefited from the post-War compromise—an
irony of history, yes that compromise struck by the forces of political liber-
alism to build the welfare state!—but now feels and more often than not is
“left behind.” If not exclusively—because fear mongering and hate speech do
matter—this is a story of relative status decline, accompanied by a number
of very real and harsh consequences, such as the opioid drug crisis and the
surge in suicides in the US that many link (we think convincingly) to such
economic hardship. It has a strong racial and gender component: the bread-
winner that no longer can earn a sufficient household and loses a position
of relative privilege (Fraser 2016). This motive recurs in the US after the
welfare reforms of the 1990s and in Europe in the early 2000s as much as it
does, in a curious, reversed scenario in Brazil, where existing middle classes
have felt increasingly threatened by the rise of ethnically different working
classes (Solano in this volume).
It is important to emphasize that the neoliberal compromise was not just im-
posed by conservatives, more often criticized for their proximity to the private
sector. Rather, in a phenomenon labeled progressive neoliberalism by Nancy
Fraser (2017), parties of the (center-) left grew increasingly fond of the so-called
New Economy and Silicon Valley during the 1990s, becoming complicit in
a market fundamentalism that is now creating a global backlash. This is now
being leveraged against the left. In short, depending on context and political
culture, tropes of ethno-nationalist nostalgia, fears of ethnic extinction, tra-
ditional Christian values, and/or critiques of political correctness are being
mobilized to redefine the body politic and exclude minorities, feminists, intel-
lectuals, social democrats, and the broader left. The strategic use of conserva-
tive narratives and the remaking of leftist markers has been a successful political
tool and has also served as a smokescreen for those parties that actually made it
to power: for instance, in Eastern and Central Europe (Krastev in this volume).

Remaking the State

Once in power, autocratic populists seek to weaken established democratic
mechanisms that limit their power. The illiberal party undermines the sepa-
ration of powers, particularly with attacks upon the independence of the ju-
diciary; it assaults the fourth estate and sows doubts about its credibility and
curtails the freedom of speech. All forms of contradiction to the strongman
leader are rejected. What the leader says (not the ‘corrupted’ media) is supposed
to become the truth. Truth, put differently, is not something arrived at through
20  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

deliberation in the public sphere but through authority and tradition. Journal-
ists and the free press constantly challenge this authority and therefore become
themselves enemies of the people. The same holds, of course, for ivory tower
intellectuals; spoilt middle-class students; and children environmentalists, à la
Greta Thunberg, who are seen as part of the privileged elites who want to take
the last shirt off the hard-working people’s back.
Illiberal politicians seek to stabilize their power by surrounding themselves
with loyal nepotists and family in public offices, intimidating and seeking polit-
ical dirt on their opponents at home and abroad, and changing the rules of the
electoral system. Gerrymandering and other political tools are used to reduce
the competitiveness of political opponents, and electoral defeats are generally
viewed as the result of irregularities—how could the demos not vote their true
leader who is clearly the only one defending their interests? Only rarely, so far (as
recently in the case of Poland), do illiberals advance (limited) social policy pro-
grams for the lower middle classes. What this indicates, nonetheless, is that they
cannot act only by submission. This need to sustain their legitimacy leads such
decision-makers to also accelerate economic growth through hyper-deregulation
and privatization and the sell-off of remaining public goods, while at the same
time pacifying economic elites (tending to be part of the majority population and
not fearing resentments against minorities) through tax breaks and pro-business
legislation. Securing the benevolence of the upper (middle) classes through major
tax cuts contradicts earlier critiques of wasteful spending by old elites, but that
does not seem to be important any more. Concerns with clientelism and conflicts
of interest are equally brushed aside, claiming that everybody would rationally
act this way, and that what was more important than focusing on these marginal
details were the injuries inflicted on the true demos by others.
We are by no means saying that illiberalism automatically leads to fascism.
But illiberal actors create a political climate in which lies, corruption, and
violence become acceptable everyday phenomena and where democracy dis-
integrates to a point where these forces can gain power. In some cases, this
process is incremental—Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn us that often
“[d]emocracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible” (2018, 6)—in others,
it is accelerated by external shocks and systematically used states of emergency,
i.e. attempted coups (see Coşkun and Kölemen in this volume), terrorist attacks
or when these are absent, the potential for such (see Surak in this volume), and
interethnic violence (see Sundar in this volume), inter alia. The suppression of
opposition and the creation of a de facto one-party state through changes in
the electoral system can be and are being legitimized along the same lines, as
much as is the curtailing of political rights and the militarization of society.
From that point onward, the distinction between this sort of democracy and a
dictatorship, resting on little more than the fact of holding elections, but incit-
ing political violence against political opponents and intimidating oppositional
voices, becomes blurred.
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  21

Conclusion: Illiberalism Is Not Only Anti-Liberalism

Liberal democracy is at a crossroads. Four decades of market fundamentalism,
put into political practice by elites from both the center-left and center-right,
have hollowed out the promises of political liberalism, not just in the US or
in the European Union and its individual member states (Blyth 2013; Offe
2015), but equally so in other nation-states with different commitments to
democratization across the world. The promise of market efficiency has been
used to reform labor markets, slash social budgets, and shift all social risks to
individuals. All this happened under the pretext that no alternative was possi-
ble, simply because globalization—this seemingly overwhelming, external set
of dynamics—had forced the hand of politicians on all levels of government
in every region of the world, however advanced its economic development
and whatever the status of its regime type. Meanwhile, elected officials, often
unresponsive to their own constituencies, did in fact legislate in a way very
much responsive to the desires of expanding transnational companies. This
pattern of revolving doors and lucrative partnerships has led to a serious erosion
of trust and a pervasive sense of injustice. As the West loses its faith not just in
economic liberalism, but in what has been used as a justification to remake so-
ciety in its image—liberal democracy—so do nation-states in the global south
that are increasingly disappointed by the failed promises of liberalism and even
come to see the liberal order as a ruse to extend colonial rule with the means
of the market.
The critique of liberalism, and by implication of liberal democracy, is no
longer only a progressive critique as it had been in the years immediately after
the global financial crisis. Instead, more often than not, it has been rearticulated
by reactionary movements into a critique of an aloof elitism. All boils down to
a stylized face-off between the cosmopolitan globalists, jetting from global city
to global city, and those who truly care for the real, hard-working people. But
illiberalism is not just a reaction. Its agents actively seek to remake politics and
follow specific interests—illiberalism is not just an irrational change of mood
in parts of the population. It is characterized, from an economic perspective,
by hyper-liberalization and clientelism at home as well as a neo-mercantilist
recalibration on the inter-state level. Illiberal politicians tend to reject and hol-
low out some of the central institutions and procedures of liberal democracy
(court-packing in the judicial branch, undermining the separation of powers,
limiting the franchise, attacking free speech and opponents), and recast democ-
racy in partial ways as a protection of sovereignty based on a clearly ethnically
demarcated demos.
But this is not simply an autocratic wave: in fact, rather than a sudden surge
at the right, we note a crisis of conviction in the center. If our analysis is right,
ways out of an illiberal world therefore need to address two crises at once.
The first is the protracted crisis of political liberalism itself. That is the root
22  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

cause that led to the implosion of neoliberalism, particularly in the core group

of Western democracies. Markets alone simply cannot bring social peace and
stability domestically; consult Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill on this. Neither
can they assure more legitimate and harmonious inter-state relations, as prac-
tice shows. Citizens need to be equipped with a modicum of political and social
rights if the moniker of liberal democracy is to hold any credibility and describe
viable processes. That includes limits on the influence of particular interests on
government, the provision of a range of public goods (including health care, edu-
cation, affordable housing, and mobility), options for social mobility, and the re-
regulation of labor markets. Moreover, there needs to be a notion of the common
good—an important reason why an integrative civic (not ethnically exclusive)
type of nationalism indeed fulfills an important political role that shouldn’t sim-
ply be abandoned for the sake of an idealistic cosmopolitanism (Calhoun 2007).
Populists in power offer none of this, but neither or only rarely do estab-
lishment parties. In national contexts where autocrats are not yet in office, for
center-left parties in particular, this means that a political vision would need
to be articulated in opposition not just to would-be autocrats but to almost a
half-century of policies that have enriched the few and harmed the many—an
alternative to the politics of no alternatives that does not revert to fear. Cosmo-
politanism will have to mean something different from a simplistic embrace of
open markets. On the center-right, questions of identity and belonging as well
as the tradeoff between security and civil liberties will have to be reassessed
and renegotiated in earnest to offer alternatives to citizens so-inclined. But
these debates will have to be pursued strictly within the space of democratic
contestation.
The question of scale is a reasonable and important one that democracies
must face squarely, on the basis of a debate grounded in rational deliberation.
What would be the most emancipatory way to organize politics, given that the
global economy is as yet unmatched by global political institutions? What is the
role of the nation and the nation-state in creating true alternatives to neoliberal
globalization? Such a debate is best predicated on the observation that democ-
racy thrives on visions of abundance. Such imaginaries make sharing in the
common good possible, and don’t limit politics to zero-sum games.
But if the crisis of democracy is older than the Trump presidency, illiberal
politicians like him do add a new layer of complexity to the challenges liberal
democracy is facing. The second crisis requires a different set of approaches. No
doubt, autocratic movements learn from one another across national boundar-
ies. They also have a structural advantage, given the conjuncture of apocalyptic
scenarios dominating politics and fueling fear: chronic unemployment, displace-
ment by technology, terrorism, pandemics, and even human extinction. And yet,
illiberalism is not self-fulfilling or inexorable. Examples of autocracy elsewhere
can also serve as a warning sign to those who want to defend the potentials of
democracy and who seek to rearticulate them, not as a return to  the  market
 Illiberalism and Its Variants  23

fundamentalism of the past, but as a set of political ideas and practices in their
own right (see Wiesner in this volume for the case of the European Union).
Can the specters of illiberalism and hatred be overcome? It certainly has been
done before and we do also see hopeful signs for a democratic revitalization,
such as the repoliticization of public discourses, marches against antiplural-
ists and racists, and solidarity between democratic actors in civil society. Even
though they have been instrumentalized for the wrong purposes, we believe
that there are indeed political values worth salvaging in the liberal tradition
(Katznelson 2013). Political liberalism articulates social ideals that help provide
mechanisms for (an approximation of ) self-rule in modern large-scale society
while seeking to protect the rights of individuals and minorities in a pluralistic
society. It can bring with it a culture of political liberty and social emancipa-
tion that no other regime can. Liberal democracy will need to be reinvented
to find a way out of its self-made crisis of legitimacy and an important part of
this will be to rethink liberalism as a project in political economy, rather than
a merely political or economic policy program. Only thus will it be possible to
address the rightful concerns and true economic and ecological grievances that
untrammeled market rule has brought with it.

Notes

24  Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

the authors of this longer-standing critique highlighted that the market form can
present a political problem of its own. Nancy Fraser (2016), Robert Kuttner (2018),
Jamie Peck (2010), Fran Tonkiss, and Don Slater (2001) are only some among a
whole list of authors who emphasize that the logic of the market is, after all, fun-
damentally not consistent with the logic of democracy, or even, to refer to Karl
Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) seminal argument many of these authors build on, corrosive
to the survival of society itself.
5 In the US, by and large, it is only the super-rich and/or the corporations that store
and expand their wealth that are still heard in the political process, while the inter-
ests of the middle class and lower income groups have become background noise
that is barely perceived at all (Gilens 2012). In such a context, elections degenerate
into a public spectacle of democracy, while political decisions are made behind
closed doors, with the support of influential lobbyists (Bartels 2008).
6 Indeed, the attempt in this volume to include commentary from across the ideo-
logical spectrum alongside analysis that aspires to impartiality evidences that we, as
editors, have our own concerns about the insularity of academic discourse.

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